Yesterday Randall posted on the Nvidia product roadmap. Let's take a little bit deeper look at the new GPU chips that were announced. However, before we do that, let's also take a look at the latest GPU chip to help estimate what we could see in these future chips.

Tesla was named about Nikola Tesla. Fermi was named after the physicist Enrico Fermi. We know a lot about the Fermi GPU since it is publicly available. Fermi has 3.0 billion transistors, and is manufactured by TSMC in a 40 nm process. The Tesla C2050 / C2070 GPU Computing Processor can do 515.2 GFlops and consumes about 247 watts of power. The only difference between the C2050 and the C2070 is the amount of memory. The C2050 has 3 GB and the C2070 has 6 GB. That makes the GFlops per watt ratio for the C2070 to be approximately 2.0, and the C2050 to be approximately 2.16. Taking a look at the chart, the C2070 coincides with the top line of the Fermi chip.

The next GPU from Nvidia is code named Kepler, which is named for the mathematician Johannes Kepler. Kepler will be released sometime in 2011, and will be manufactured on a 28nm process. If the top of the chip is the correct value, then Nvidia is estimating that the double-precision Gigaflops performance of 5.7 GFlops per watt. Using 250 watts to represent the maximum amount of electrical power that Nvidia can use, then the Kepler C3070 will be able to compute at 1.425 Tflops in double precision. Yes, I made up the name C3070. I just followed Nvidia's standard naming convention, which will likely change. That makes Kepler about 2.7 times faster than the Fermi C2070.

The follow-on GPU to Kepler will be the Maxwell which is named for the mathematician James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell will be released sometime in 2013, and will be manufactured on a 22nm process. If the top of the chip is the correct value, then Nvidia is estimating that the double-precision Gigaflops performance of 15.7 GFlops per watt. Using 250 watts to represent the maximum amount of electrical power that Nvidia can use, then the Maxwell C4070 will be able to compute at 3.925 Tflops in double precision. Again, I made up the name C4070. That makes Maxwell about 7.6 times faster than the Fermi C2070.

Let us further suppose that we want to know how much computing this would give us in a rack, and use that to build a high performance computer.